Mini Review: The Likeability Factor

When I read Tim Sanders' (former Yahoo! executive) first book, Love is the Killer App, I was blown away by Sanders' writing style and truly unique ideas about the business world.  It changed the way I see human interaction.  I was unfortunately not as taken with his second book, The Likeability Factor.

Now, I have to come clean here and admit something: I prefer audio books as they capture accents, humor and subtleties in a way that words on a page cannot and I read (listened) to Sanders' first book while driving to and from Baltimore each day.  For his second work, I chose the old fashioned paper approach.  I only mention this because it impacted my overall experience of his book, probably not to its benefit.

The Likeability Factor has one central premise which I completely agree with: much of life is a popularity contest so why not maximize the degree to which folks like you?  Pretty simple but oh so true!  Unfortunately, much of the book takes on a style that left me waiting for something more substantial that what it had to offer.  I was anxious for real life business-world examples but Tim preferred to keep much of the content on the "soft" side and shared but a few examples of personal change in the lives of folks he knew.  One gets a sense that Tim has gone away from his concrete exepriences at Yahoo! and Broadcast.com and swerved heavily into the self-help lane where content is created, not so much discovered.

While Tim Sanders is in my mind a true innovator, a gifted speaker and makes a needed contribution to biz life, The Likeability Factor came up a bit short.  Now I'm moving on to Malcolm Caldwell's The Tipping Point with a review coming in the next month or so.

Audio follow up:  you can listen to an audio sample of Tim's book here.